Two progressives battle for Assembly seat
A caller to KQED’s “Forum” interrupted the sparring between the candidates in the hotly contested East Bay Assembly special election — Mia Bonta and Janani Ramachandran — to interject a rare shot of positivity into a race that has grown increasingly testy as Tuesday’s election day approaches. “I’m actually very excited about both candidates, and it’s actually hard to choose for once,” said the caller, who identified herself as Melanie. “We have two activist, progressive, women of color which is an amazing choice to have to make.”
Either candidate likely would be among the most progressive members of the Legislature. That’s not surprising, as the 18th Assembly district — which includes much of Oakland, from its wealthier hills to its poorer flatlands, along with Alameda and San Leandro — is among the most left-leaning in California. Here, having two progressive women of color competing to represent it isn’t just celebrated as being newsworthy: It’s seen as overdue.
So the ongoing battle between the two is not just about where they stand on the issues,
but how they stand on them. Ramachandran said she believes that Bonta is too “corporate” to be progressive and deliver on what she says. Bonta counters that Ramachandran is a lightweight, all “hashtags” with little ability to fulfill her lofty promises.
Bonta, the 49-year-old president of the Alameda Unified School District Board who handily won the eight-candidate primary in June, points to her elective office experience, endorsements by a wide variety of Democrats and potential to work with other legislators as reasons to send her to Sacramento. Backed by more than $2 million from her own campaign and outside groups, she has a vast fundraising advantage, and boasts of support from many legislators and labor unions, including Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee, progressive Oakland city council president Nikki Fortunato Bas and Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams.
She is the CEO of Oakland Promise, a nonprofit cradle-tocollege support program focused on the city’s low-income students. That, she said, has enabled her to make contacts in the district and Sacramento.
Ramachandran, 29, a social justice attorney and former member of the Oakland Public Ethics commission, is centering her campaign on being free of corporate influence. The Oakland resident says Bonta — like many legislators — would be incapable of carrying out a progressive agenda because she would be beholden to wealthy donors who oppose those plans.
Ramachandran alleges supporters have poured money into Bonta’s campaign to curry favor with her husband, Rob Bonta, who held this seat until Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed him to be state attorney general. The Oakland resident boasts endorsements from Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, Our Revolution — the organization formed in the wake of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first presidential run — and the youth environmental organization Sunrise Bay Area.
Analysts say the two generally agree on many issues.
“In California and across the country you’ve seen the sort of moderate versus progressive battles, but you don’t have that here,” said former assemblyman Ted Lempert, who teaches about California politics at UC Berkeley. “You’ve got two clear progressives.”
“In a race like this,” Lempert said, voters will decide based on “personality, endorsements, who’s giving them money, who’s going to be more effective and what they’re going to prioritize (in Sacramento). You’ve got a more narrow band of distinguishing characteristics.”
Take how they talk about the minimum wage. Ramachandran supports raising the statewide minimum wage — currently at $14 an hour — to $22 an hour. That would align the wage floor with California’s true cost of living, she said.
Bonta, who is endorsed by the 136,000-member Alameda Labor Council, said that Ramachandran’s “false cry” for a $22 minimum wage illustrates their differences. Bonta remembered the “struggles that the labor movement went through” during the six years it took to convince legislators to set the $15-an-hour baseline that takes effect in January.
“I would love a $22-an hour minimum wage. In fact, I would love a $25-an-hour minimum wage,” Bonta said. “But I formulate my policy positions based on experience and practice. So before putting out a policy statement like, ‘Let’s go for $22 an hour minimum wage,’ I considered what have been going through in this moment right now, in the middle of COVID, as so many small businesses are trying to recover and so many workers were struggling to try to get back to work.”
Bonta said she would initially focus on helping the region recover from the pandemic if she won.
Ramachandran said she doesn’t believe that Bonta can truly call herself a “progressive.” While Bonta may say she supports a single-payer health plan for California, Ramachandran said it’s unlikely she would advocate for it in Sacramento given that she has received campaign contributions from Blue Shield and other opponents of the plan.
Ramachandran said she would focus on health care and housing if elected.
She attributed Bonta’s endorsements — even those of Abrams and Congresswoman Lee, who famously cast the only vote in Congress to oppose going to war after the Sept. 11 attacks — as being a product of wanting to be “connected to the second most powerful politician in California” — Rob Bonta.
Rob Bonta has told me that “Mia Bonta stands on her own two feet. She always has since I’ve known her when she was 17 years old,” when they met as freshmen at Yale University.
Rob Bonta said “there’s a tinge of sexism, frankly, in folks who say her success or her powerful campaign is somehow attributable to her husband. As long as I’ve know her, she’s always done it on her own.”
To Ramachandran, you are who your donors are. She hears from people while campaigning door-to-door who agree with her “that when you take their money, you take their side. And that is what California history has shown.”
Mia Bonta said that when she closes her eyes and listens to Ramachandran, she sounds like conservative Republican recall candidate John Cox, delivering “exactly the same kind of message of fear, and of establishment politics doing us wrong.”
“I’m an independent person with my own mind and with my own perspectives,” Mia Bonta has told me in response to criticism about her donors.
Ramachandran predicted that Tuesday’s results would ripple across California. She said she knows of at least 10 candidates taking on “corporate Democrats” who are closely watching. If a candidate like her “cannot win in one of California’s most progressive districts,” she said, “what hope is there for the candidate in southern California or the candidate in the Central Valley or far north in California.”
The two candidates agree on one thing: This race is close. Only 21% of registered voters cast ballots in the primary. And with turnout likely to be low in this off-the-traditional calendar election in the shadow of California’s recall campaign, anything could happen.